Week 1: A Very Long Book Report

Hello everyone! Welcome back to my Banned Books Blog. This week has been all about reading and reacting to my books so far. I started off this week editing my Lolita and The Catcher in the Rye reader response essays and taking feedback from my advisor, Dr. Lisa, adding in quotes from the books and page numbers in order to back up my reactions. The edited versions are stored in my Cold War Book Bannings Shared Google Drive folder, and linked:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/16fiQcHnMAcZccwaZuIZKDC4aYU5Oj3OLefPl7KD9fLw/edit?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gi8K1ecfXRuTfvemFkAmEZW6M9rLMiiJfwjmVLe8rz4/edit?usp=sharing

For these essays, I have been examining how specific quotations elicited a specific response from me and hypothesized why the book was banned based on my reaction to it. Through my own emotional response, I will attempt to predict how others during the time period reacted to each novel. At the end of each essay, I predicted why readers would have found each novel outrageous or taboo, then I predicted why it was challenged and eventually, government-banned. Lolita was banned and challenged in both the United States and the Soviet Union, and The Catcher in the Rye was banned in the United States only. Because I worked on reader responses this week, I decided to begin analytical research on the authors of the books I’ve already read on the list in the following weeks. Each reader essay is around 1500-1600 words long and focused on the plot of the novel, and again, my response.

This week I also chatted with Dr. Lisa about my We reader response and discussed my ideas about how I wanted to execute it. I decided to restart that essay because I felt it to be inadequate, but I will be working on that today. I also began my introduction and first body paragraph of my Animal Farm reader response, which I will meet with Dr. Lisa about in the following days to come. So far, I’ve discussed how We made me feel disappointed and Animal Farm made me feel afraid. Each novel so far has elicited an entirely different response from me, including 1984, my current read, which I am almost done with reading.

All in all, for a brief overview, I revised my first two essays, began rewriting my We essay, and started the Animal Farm essay, as well as getting close to completing 1984. In the next week, my goal is to complete We and Animal Farm responses, begin research essays, finish 1984, and start on the next book on my list: Doctor Zhivago. Thank you for reading, and see you all next week!